Fellows

Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing, USC

L. A. (Liz) Johnson completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she is currently a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future postdoctoral fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appear in The Atlantic, Best New Poets, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. As a writer and a scholar, she believes in the power of creative expression to transform both the individual and the greater community. Find more about her at http://www.la-johnson.com.

Professor of Art History, USC

Ph.D. in American Studies, Harvard University
Dissertation: Visions of Study: Social Architecture of Insurgent Learning

Laura Nelson has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and a M.St. in Literature from Oxford University, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. Over the past five years, she has taught courses on literature, film, cultural history, and education at Harvard, Deep Springs College, and Tidelines Institute. Alongside teaching and research, Laura organizes experimental spaces of gathering and learning in cities and has been a part of collective projects including the Library of Study, the Oakland Summer School, and There Will Always Be Soup. Her current book project, Practices of Study: Assembling a Counter Education, aims to celebrate traditions and histories of learning outside institutions.

Ph.D. Candidate in English, USC

Ph.D. Candidate in English, USC

Sarah Frontiera is a doctoral candidate in the English Department and a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future Fellow at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on animal commodities in the nineteenth century, both in the context of their consumption as domestic products as well as their manufacture. The racialized subjects that labored in proximity to these animal materials were discursively conflated with these commodities, resulting in a proximity that was a provocative mix of agency and affect. In addition to her scholarly research, Sarah works alongside USC Dornsife’s Office of Communications, developing brand identity for USC’s liberal arts college and writing articles for Dornsife News.

Associate Professor of English, USC

Ph.D. in History, UCLA

Professor of History, Spatial Sciences, and Law, USC

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is an historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with particular attention to the transnational influences that shaped modern national politics. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and then in 2015 published a first book on a different topic: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard). His current book project is a wide-angle cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, from the 1760s through the 1820s, which rethinks the era’s putative role in creating modern democratic politics. The book argues that disparate revolutionary movements were united not so much by common political structures or ideologies but by a shared matrix of eighteenth-century cultural practices, and that these practices left a common and (in many respects) illiberal stamp on the polities that they helped to create. Nathan also maintains interests in early modern legal history; historical methods and historiography; and histories of material culture.

Ph.D. in English, Princeton University

Mollie Eisenberg is an interdisciplinary literary scholar whose research focuses on detective fiction, transatlantic modernism, and the sociology of literature. Her dissertation, The Case of the Self-Conscious Detective Novel: Detection, Metafiction, and the Terms of Literary Value reads self-reflexive literary form as a meeting place between the formalist and materialist histories of twentieth-century literary aesthetics, situating detective fiction in relation to transatlantic modernism and the modernist moment’s theoretical and sociological redefinitions of literature and its uses. She arrives at USC Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future with investments in educational access, institutional justice, and public scholarship developed during four years supporting her dissertation completion work as an adjunct lecturer in the composition and literature classrooms at Lehman College of the City University of New York and in previous work as an editor of scholarly books for general audiences at W.W. Norton & Company. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a B.A. from Reed College, all in English, and is working on a book project based on the dissertation.

Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature, USC

Marci Vogel holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC, where she currently serves as a Postdoctoral Scholar Teaching Fellow in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Her literary, scholarly, and translation work frequently merges critical and creative modes as a means of uncovering new knowledges through new uses of language. Of particular interest are the ways by which imaginative acts of language facilitate understanding and engender interconnection. A first-generation college graduate, Vogel has designed new courses in eco-poetics and poetry in translation for USC’s General Education Program. She is the author of one book of prose fiction, one collection of poetry, and the Jacket2 commentary series, A poetics of the Étrangère.

Ph.D. Candidate in History, USC

Laura Dominguez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Her research interests include racial formation, settler colonialism, placemaking, and public memory in the American West. Her dissertation traces histories and landscapes of repair in Los Angeles from the late eighteenth through early twenty-first centuries. Previously, Laura worked in preservation advocacy and education for the Los Angeles Conservancy and San Francisco Heritage. She is also a founding board member of Latinos in Heritage Conservation. She holds a Master of Historic Preservation from USC and a B.A. in the History and Theory of Architecture from Columbia University.

Professor, American Studies and Ethnicity, USC

Natalia Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. Professor Molina’s scholarship has been supported by various organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. She is the author of two award-winning books, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, as well as the recently released edited volume entitled Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice. Her current book project entitled Place-makers: The Story of an Ethnic Mexican Community in 20th Century Los Angeles examines eight decades of place making, community formation, and gentrification in the historically multiethnic Los Angeles community of Echo Park. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Prof. Molina enjoys opportunities for intellectual and cultural exchanges and has lectured throughout Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as well as over 30 of the 50 United States.

Ph.D. Candidate in History, USC

Yesenia Navarrete Hunter is a PhD Candidate in History working with Professor George Sanchez at the University of Southern California. Her work centers on histories of the Pacific Northwest with a focus on Mexican American and Native American interactions in the 20th century. Her project, called “Entangled Histories of Land and Labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20th Century,” centers on concurrent histories that are both fraught with tensions, and have produced new relationships that are both public and intimate. These relationships give rise to questions of shifting identities on the agricultural landscapes. Her work uses oral histories, archival research, material practice, and mapping of migration rhythms to understand place-making and Indigenous identity.

Yesenia was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, an Imagining America Fellow, and currently the USC Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future PhD Fellow. The trajectory of her accomplishment demonstrates her ability to bridge her scholarship with public work. Yesenia is recognized as a dynamic public speaker and leads workshops on local and entangled histories through participation and dialogue. Yesenia is also an accomplished artist. Her art and scholarship are fueled by her role as a mother and past role as a migrant farmworker, and is deeply influenced by the music, poetry, and community building elements of the practice of the fandango.